


all the creatures in the world

by crushinator



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, cannibalism warning, emetophobia warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crushinator/pseuds/crushinator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are fourteen sweeps old, and you think you are a Mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the creatures in the world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TobuIshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobuIshi/gifts).



> Illustrations by [Scratchconstruct](http://scratchconstruct.tumblr.com/)

When you ate through your egg and wriggled fat and hungry to the cavern floor the Prioress selected you out of all your brood to tend the Mother Grub with her. You know this, because she has told you. Twice a perigee, she tells you this and takes take you and your sisters to the oblong eggs of the Virgin grubs and shows you their color: Jade, deep Jade, like hers, like yours. You are rare. You are special. Raised up out of all the creatures in the world.

You are meant for special things. You are meant to stay with the creatures that share your blood and shoosh them as they keen and cull them if they hatch twisted or small or sweet-tempered. Only the most agile Virgins can climb to the top of the caverns and bore through the stone roof to ripen under the blistering sun. Only the fiercest can survive the cholerbears and lions and hordes of daydamned undead. Only the largest can find her way back to the cavern, challenge the old Mother, devour her, and establish her own brood. You are meant to feed her fresh chunks of blind mudworm flesh and discarded grub corpses and unhatched egg packets to ensure her strength and fertility. You are meant to ensure that her eggs stay ensconced in the fertile slime that will nourish them and serve as their second meal. You are meant to cull the ones that are born deformed or weak or sick or slow because only the strongest should survive to pupation to face the trials that will determine whether they survive to adulthood, like the Mother, like you. 

You don’t mind the culling. Without a strong mother, the whole will suffer. Without a strong population, the Mother will create more undesirable grubs, and weakness will eat your race from the inside. To cull is to care about the future. You will always bear this with grace. 

It is the 6th dark season of the 12th bilunar perigee. A meteor has landed nearby, and so the Prioress has informed you and your sisters that you are meant to venture to the surface to collect meteoric eskolaite. You think the Prioress is meant to shut up every once in a while. But you do not argue. You are low on dye. Meteors are common, and Jade grubs far too rare and precious to waste on that sort of frivolity. It is Kriset’s turn to go, but you volunteer in her place after swapping a few less hours in the brooding chambers. 

You often volunteer to venture to the surface in place of the other dedicants. There is something about the sun you like. Even if it isn’t in the sky, you can still feel it there, just past the solar terminator. It isn’t uncommon among Jadebloods to have an affinity for sunlight, but yours borders on the pathological, or so the Contessa likes to remind you. 

That stuck-up saccharine shoeless fuckrock. You platonically hope she chokes on her next grubsteak. 

You pause at the peak of Murderfist Hill. There is a hissing noise like a punctured double-pronged tubesnake. nearby. You spot the meteor smoking in the red sand, at the cleft of a blue river. If you are lucky, it will be a fat one, full of eskolaite and chromium. If not, well, you suppose your clade could always use more iron. 

The hissing increases as you approach. It isn’t until you’re feet away that you realize it isn’t coming from the chunk of space stone, but from a bright, candy-red thing half submerged in the water. It splashes at you weakly with its tiny pointed legs. 

It’s a grub. You open your mouth and balk. 

You’ve seen many, many grubs since your pupation. More before that, you have been told, but you can’t remember them. You’ve seen every shade a grub can be. You even saw a tyrian grub once, though the drones whisked it away as soon as it broke the skin of its cocoon. You are 100% positive you’ve never seen a grub of this color before. You wonder if there are even any lusii on the planet with blood the same color as this grub’s. 

You doubt it. 

You pick it up. It bites your thumb. Jade blood oozes from under your claw and smears against the grub’s stupidly red body, weird and clashing like those gross freeze-dried fruit bricks the Contessa always makes for 12th Perigee’s Eve. The grub scrunches its face and repeatedly licks the roof of its mouth to get rid of the taste of your blood. You are horrified to find a warm feeling settling somewhere in the region of your bloodpusher. 

You should cull it before the drones find it. Yes. You should cull it. It will be better that way. If you don’t, the drones will. If the drones don’t, a passing beast will. If a passing beast doesn’t, exposure and starvation will. You must cull it. 

The grub bares its teeth at you and attempts to growl. This comes out as more of a gargle. 

Why are you hesitating? You’ve culled thousands of grubs for thousands of reasons. This one is robust and fat and keeps gnawing your knuckles and hissing when you move but you can’t allow it to live. It’s an aberration. A mistake. Unique out of everything you have ever seen. 

A star brighter than the rest flickers in the dim sky. You tuck the hissing grub onto your left hip, its teeth aimed away from your body. There’s a trading post five days walk from here. If you walk quickly, you believe you can make it in four. 

*******

It’s easy enough to find food for it. Grubs will eat anything. After they hatch, they eat their yolks (unless Kriset eats them first), and after they eat their yolks, they eat cave slime, stillborn grubs, rotting carcasses, ovoid cases, lichens; anything organic they happen to wriggle across is devoured. They become so fat they can’t move, and then they pupate, usually only a few feet from where they hatched. 

Finding food for yourself is another matter. You have never been hungry. Your needs have always been met by the drones or the elders (special circumstances for special trolls, the Prioress whispers in your aural canal). You have hunted, but only mudworms, which are slow, stupid, and blind. The first time you try to hunt on the surface, you catch a jackalope, and it kicks you in the face and vanishes into a hole in the ground. The second time, your prey doesn’t even let you come close enough to get kicked. The third time, you don’t even bother. The horrideer passes peacefully. You wish its bloodpusher would explode so you could eat it without hassle. 

You take to eating whatever the grub eats. This is a good enough strategy until the grub eats a mass of black jerky you found under a rock that leaves you shitting and vomiting for an entire day. The grub eats your vomit. You consider eating the grub. 

You pass out before you can do this. When you wake up, you find the grub sleeping under your arm, its face pressed into your thorax. There is a dead megaroach next to your head. It’s the size of an egg sac. You eat it, legs and all. 

*******

When you reach the trading post, the pawnbreaker attempts to buy the grub.

"Never seen one that color before," she says. She gestures towards her collection of ready-to-maim weapons, but her eyes are on the grub as it flops along the counter. "When you planning on eating it?"

You are prepared for this. "Later," you say. The grub squeaks. You stop yourself from papping it quiet. "They're best when they're ready to pupate. Do you have that in green?"

The pawnbreaker nods and pulls out a tube of lipstick encased in a mellow green. You unsheath it. It springs alive, heavy and dangerous in your hand. It smells like petroleum. You want it very badly. The pawnbreaker doesn't fail to notice.

"Tell you what," she says. "If you let me buy that grub from you, I'll let you have this one AND the Fuschia Facefucker 3000. Hottest color of the season! Half price."

You can see grubsteaks in her eyes. Possibly raw. You cap the lipstick. It clicks thickly on the glass as you place it in front of her.

"Your price is as insulting as your merchandise. Give me the Sopor Sack and the Family Fun Slaughter Kit. I’ll take the Quadruple Twinkie Cake as well. Don't dawdle.”

She scowls, but does as you command. You reach into your pocket and pull out a small, round electronic device. There is a small button on it. It glows gently green. 

She slams your merchandize in front of you. The glass doesn’t crack, but it shakes and sends the grub skittering for you. You pick it up and stick it in your rucksack. The merchandize follows. 

You pass the device to her. “Here. One drone, guaranteed to haul loads up to 2 tons.”

She takes it. It rolls in her palms. She passes it from hand to hand, a slight frown on her face. “How long’s it gonna stick around?” 

“A few perigees,” you say. “Then it dies. They’re very good to eat.”

She looks at you. She looks at your rucksack. She smiles. 

“Better test it,” she says.

Your blood pools at your feet. “No, wait-”

She presses the button. There is a neon flash and then the sphere crunches in on itself like a black hole. You punch the pawnbreaker in the face so hard that you feel something in your wrist buckle and you are suddenly doubled over with pain. You hit one of your horns on the counter on your way down. All you see is scintillating light. The grub screeches in your sack. The floor is splintery, you register, and you groan. 

You need to get out of here. You are going to die if you don’t get out of here. You are both going to die. You for your abscondence and the grub for its color. You force yourself to your feet, your injured hand held in front of you like a mantis claw. You pocket two tubes of lipstick and leave the groaning body of the pawnbreaker behind you as you rush out the door. You should kill her but you have no time. You can already hear a distant buzz. 

*******

The grub is bruised. A mottled maroon spot fans across its side. If only it were that color all over. Your wrist is killing you. 

You are in a cave. You don’t know how long or how far you ran before exhaustion and pain kicked in and you crawled into the nearest hole for shelter. You hope that the drone found no evidence that you were there. You hope that you didn’t leave any blood on the floor or that the pawnbreaker didn’t say anything. You are not sure how much drones understand but you are sure that the drone would understand the word “mutant.” 

The grub whimpers. You pap it with your uninjured hand. You break one of the Quadruple Twinkie Cakes in half. One you give to yourself and the other you give to the grub. It eats it quickly. You also give it the wrapper. It curls up in your lap and falls asleep. 

You were hoping to hunt, but with your wrist like this, you will have to rely on the cakes. You don’t think that it’s broken, but it isn’t strong enough to hold lipstick, much less cleave it through a wild beast. You hope the cakes will last until you heal. 

You ball your hand into a fist and slam it into the wall. Fuck that pawnbreaker. Fuck your idiocy. What did you think would happen if someone saw the grub? Did you think they’d bow? Did you think they’d give you free stuff because of how special you are? You stupid shitting wriggler. You’re not special. You were never special. You’re a genetic mistake. A fucking joke.

The quality of dark shifts. A rock goes skidding across the ground and hits you in the foot. You go stiff. There’s something at the entrance of the cave. 

Of fucking course.

You shift, and the grub slides to the floor. It writhes in its sleep but doesn’t wake up when you stick it in your rucksack. You are not sure you can use your lipstick with one hand, but you take one of the tubes out of your pocket just in case. You hope you stole a self-starting model. You stand, and you steel yourself to deliver. 

A groan rattles in your aural canals. The dark shifts again and you see a gnarled, spongy foot, then a fleshy hand trailing strings of skin. It shuffles fully into sight and looks at you with white, empty eyes. Its caste sign has long since rotted off its clothes, which are piped with cobalt blue. It was a troll once. Now, it’s a revenant.

You say a quick prayer to the Mother and uncap your lipstick. It revs to life. The creature screams. It postures at you as if making a wide armed bow and charges. You hold your breath and swing Cherry Zombie Dynamite one handed. You want to close your eyes, but you keep them open as wide as you can and you do not blink.

The lipstick sloughs through the revenant’s head. It pops like a putrefied egg sac. 

You drop to your knees. You are shaking all over. You want to sleep but you can’t, you can’t. Where there’s one revenant, there are a hundred more, and you don’t know that you can get that lucky again. Your only choice is to take the grub and go as deep into the cave as possible. Revenants never stray far from the sun. 

You allow yourself a few moments to steady your heart. The grub is hissing. You make yourself crawl towards the revenant instead. You find a few coins, a large trowel, and a journal riddled with holes. You harvest some of the piping and the finer buttons from whatever clothing remains on his body and put all of it into your heavy rucksack. The grub hisses louder. You talk to it as you walk, shaking, deeper into the cave.

“Shhhh,” you say to it. You brush your palm against its flank. “Quiet. I’ve got you, I’ve got you, you’re mine, I’ve got you. You’re mine.” 

*******

You spend a week, maybe more in the cave. You give all the cakes to the grub after the second day. On the third, you are able to catch a few mudworms and the both of you eat until you can’t move. You sleep in your Sopor Sack when you can and walk when you’re not asleep. When you can’t sleep, you read by the dim glow of feathery white lichen. 

The revenant you killed was an averruncator. He lived at the border of the solar terminator. He relied on his devour flower lusus to take care of the persistent revenant problem, but you suppose that they got him in the end. His journal mostly details the kinds of plants he kept, along with the kinds of plants he found edible and the kinds of plants he found dangerous. He seems to have had a predilection for the ones that required a lot of pruning. 

You don’t care about pruning. You do, however, care very much about plants that you can eat. 

*******

When your wrist heals, you take the grub and you make for the averruncator’s hive. There are several excellent reasons for this. You are running low on supplies. The sopor in your Sopor Sack is not going to last more than a few more sleep cycles. The grub is getting fat enough that you know its pupation must be near. You won’t be able to move around in the cave system once that happens. You need to find a safe place. What could be safer than a blueblood’s hive? Especially one at the solar terminus. Once the dim season arrives, no troll will come within miles of the place out of fear of the sun. It’s the perfect plan.

You cannot account for the queasy feeling in your belly. Perhaps it’s the plants.

It takes you a week to get there. The luxury of the place staggers you. You never, ever thought someone could live so well. There are rooms upon rooms and cases full of books and a pantry overstuffed with rations. Plants dead and living stuff every lit corner of the place. There are barrels of sopor in the basement and piles of spraybottles everywhere and you wish you had a moirail. You think fleetingly of the only pale crush you’ve ever had, a tall tealblood with bemused eyes and a collection of homespun sweaters she used to sell to you and your sisters twice a perigee. She always said she liked to listen to what other trolls had to say and write it down. She’s probably a court senterrorographer by now. You are sure she’d want you to eat your grub.

You and your grub eat and eat and eat and then one night, you wake up and you find that your grub has begun to build its cocoon. It’s bright red, and it’s hung it on the underside of the lowest pantry shelf, close to the food. You praise it for its fine choice of location. For the first time since you walked onto the surface in search of a fallen meteor, the tension in your belly begins to ease. And when the grub is safely ensconced in its cocoon and the Dark season gives way to the Dim, you sleep through the day, full and warm as your earliest nights in the brooding caverns, without a single terror.

Then, the drone finds you.

*******

It comes during the day, when you’re still sleeping. It doesn’t bother sneaking in; drones aren’t made to sneak. It finds the nearest window and walks through. It takes out one of the greenhouses and shoulders doors off their frames as it approaches the kitchen with the inexorability of a spawning Mother Grub, only with extremely sharp spears instead of clicking claws. You force yourself from the recuperacoon. You don’t bother with clothes. You snatch your favorite tube of lipstick from the garment consolidator and you run.

The slime makes you slow. You do not reach the kitchen before the done does. It is through the door when you reach it and stupidly shout, “Stay back!” while you rev Jungle Jade at its ponderous back. It turns and looks at you.

It is biggest drone you’ve ever seen. It’s larger than the food chiller and three times as wide. There is a rainbow of color splattered all over it; maroon, brown, yellow, blue, green... jade? Its face is an abstract swathe of blood on Imperial red and white. Its eyes are like negative prison bars. They could swallow you whole, you and the pupa, and then how special would you be? You would be nothing.

You are nothing. You are already dead. You died when you took your grub into a pawn shop and traded a drone caller for some supplies. You died when you decided to take your grub from the empty mountain where you found it. You died when the Prioress selected you above all your brood to tend the Mother Grub. You are looking your death in its technicolor face.

You will not let it be your pupa's death too.

The drone swipes one knife collection sometimes called an arm at you. Every instinct you have screams at you to lie down, to submit, to let yourself be culled for the good of your people. You open your mouth and you scream louder.

You don’t stop screaming as you duck. The drone’s arm swooshes over your horns and embeds itself into the wall. You try to sink your chainsaw into it. You only knock off a few of its spikes. Black blood oozes from it like tar. The drone roars, you keep screaming, and you try to slice it through the gut. The nose of your chainsaw snaps against the drone’s armor and the belt makes an awful GRNK sound and then snaps.

Teeth like bullets go flying. One gets you in the arm, one breaks off your horn halfway down the shaft, and far more than one shatter a few plates of armor on the drone. Your vision swims with dark green. You go lightheaded, either from pain or from the sopor that is surely soaking into your bloodstream now. You stumble backwards, into the hall, leaving a trail of blood and sopor behind you. You slip, and you fall.

To your mind, you fall slowly. So, so slowly. You drift like a bloodbat on the moonlight wind, and you land on your back like a dried leaf. Then the drone is on you. Literally. But it’s slow, so slow. It’s the easiest thing in the world for you to pluck off the tip of your dangling horn and shove it neatly into the drone’s exposed throat. You laugh as you do it. What an absurd way for anything to die. Then it lands on top of you and a number of its spikes slide right through your stomach, and you forget how to laugh.

You are looking at the ceiling. It’s blue, like the rest of the hive. Blue is the opposite of orange. Blue is the second highest of the landdwelling castes. Blue is a lovely color, you think, but not so lovely as red. Nothing is so lovely as red.

*******

You wake up, and you are different.

The drone is the same. It’s dead, and it’s heavy as you force it off you, but it isn’t so heavy as you thought it would be. You hold your hand in front of your face and you are somehow not surprised to see it giving off a bright white glow. You are very hungry for something, you think, and that something doesn’t extend to plants at all.

You push the hunger from your thoughts and stagger to the pantry. The cocoon is still there; safe, whole. You cup it with both hands and push your face to it. It smells like cotton candy. You begin to cry.

*******

When he finally tears his way out of his cocoon, he is fiercer than all the creatures in the world.

*******

  


You are fourteen sweeps old, and you think you are a Mother.

You can’t find another word for it. There isn’t another word for it. It’s like being pale and ashen for something at the same time. It’s awful. It’s wonderful. It’s more than you ever thought you’d have to bear.

You watch him as he grows. You never stay in one place for more than a week. You fight anyone who comes near him. You make sure he has food. You make sure he has clothing. You teach him to hide what he is and you teach him to stay away from strangers. You teach him to never, ever let someone see his blood. You teach him to kill when he has to and to hide when he doesn’t. You teach him to move. You teach him to steal. You teach him to laugh and to work and to be brave and to try to understand. You don’t notice when he begins to teach you until he brings home a scared kid and a weary psionic and calls them family and you take them into your home without a second thought. He breaks your heart every day and makes it anew every night and one night, one night that you will always, always keep locked inside you, away from everything that will ever happen to him and everything that he will ever do, he says he remembers you, and he calls you Porrim. 


End file.
